A history and overview
Wondering where the advice comes from, who paid for it, and why it never says what the seller keeps
Somebody taught you to save a tenth, to avoid debt, to compare the disclosed price. The advice is sound. It also has a history, and the history has founders, funders and a name.
The name came from small-loan lenders, who called themselves "personal finance companies" from 1929. The first classroom was a bank's savings desk. The profession of financial planning was founded by a sales trainer and twelve industry leaders at an airport hotel. The financial-literacy movement was conceived by a car maker's lending arm and convened by the lenders' trade association. The national standards were paid for by a student credit-card issuer and an annuity insurer.
Against all that stood a chemist, three women economists, a council with $7,000, and one foundation that refuses corporate money. Their work was real and it was small.
The pattern is in the record. Where a founder was a seller, the education taught the household to behave. Where a founder was reacting to harm, the remedy licensed and labeled the practice. Nowhere did anyone measure what the household's counterparties keep. That is the number the field has never asked for, and the reason a household needs its own.
Count how often "personal finance" appears in printed books, year by year, and the phrase rises twice. The second rise is the one you would expect, peaking around 2000 with the advice industry. The first rise peaks in 1931.
Read →In the early 1900s a wage-earner who needed $25 before payday had almost nowhere lawful to borrow it. Most states capped interest at rates no lender would accept for a loan that small.
Read →The first organized attempt to teach households about money in the United States did not come from banks or from economists. It came from a chemist.
Read →The first mass money education for American children was run by banks. The first school savings bank opened in 1889 near Philadelphia. There were fifty schools by 1890.
Read →Between the wars, a handful of economists made the household's spending their subject. Hazel Kyrk's A Theory of Consumption was published in 1923 from a Chicago dissertation accepted in 1920 and won a prize.
Read →Financial planning as a profession has a birthday. On 12 December 1969 thirteen men met at the O'Hare Inn, an airport hotel outside Chicago.
Read →Fourteen years after the profession was founded by sellers, some of its members concluded that selling was the problem. In 1982 a group met in Atlanta.
Read →The first university degree aimed at professional advisers was a bachelor's in financial and estate planning, created by Robert Bohn at Brigham Young University in the early 1980s. Golden Gate University hired him in 1982 to create the first master's.
Read →The oldest book still on the personal-finance shelf began as advertising. George Clason's parables of Babylon were pamphlets handed out by banks and insurance companies from 1920 to 1924, then bound as The Richest Man in Babylon in 1926.
Read →The first American magazine devoted to personal finance began in January 1947 as Kiplinger Magazine, and claims the title of first.
Read →"Financial literacy" is a new phrase. In printed books it is effectively absent until the 1990s, first becomes common in 2002, and is still rising. It arrived with a movement, and the movement has founders.
Read →In 1996 a panel of 156 experts, 85 financial planners and 71 educators, was asked to agree on the ratios that measure a household's financial health. They settled on twenty-two, in seven areas, with benchmarks for twenty.
Read →Ask of any field: who founded it, who paid for it, and what problem was it founded to solve? For medicine or engineering the answers are obvious.
Read →Plenee Academy provides financial information and education, not personalized financial advice. Plenee Co. is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Some of this material is written with AI assistance and may contain mistakes. Check anything you plan to act on. Legal Disclosures & Notices →